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NVIDIA unveils the world’s first quad-core mobile processor

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MWC 2026
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If you just recently bought a brand new smartphone with the most powerful processing speeds known to man, bad news, it just became obsolete. Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, NVIDIA once again kicked sand in the face of all other mobile processor manufacturers by unveiling the simply ridiculously powerful quad-core CPU, which is being called “Project Kal-El”. Project Kal-El, the newest member of the Tegra family, uses a new 12 core GeForce GPU, and it rusn 1440p video on an extreme HD display of 2560×1600.

Now, it isn’t all that uncommon for a manufacturer to come out and tell people its future plans. It is is good for the stock and the confidence in the company to let people know what they are planning, and besides, announcing projects with vague release dates is easy. But NVIDIA didn’t just announce the new quad-core processor–which is again, the first of its kind in the world–it actually showed off working models of the new chip, which they demoed on a tablet.

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If you aren’t heavily into the tech of smartphones, it might not sound like all that impressive of a leap. But to put this into perspective, we are just now beginning to see the first dual-core mobile chips hit the market, and now NVIDIA’s newest Tegra chip is due to hit the manufacturer in August. Tablets will be the first device to feature the new chip, and smartphones will have them by Christmas of this year. That is not just a technological improvement, it is a technological leap.

NVIDIA claims that the newest chip in the Tegra family will show a 5x improvement over the current Tegra 2 chip, and that is just the beginning. In 2012, “Project Wayne” will debut with 10x improvement over the Tegra 2 chip. 2013 will see the release of “Project Logan”, and 2014 will see the debut of “Project Stark”, which is promised to show a staggering 75x improvement.

To put this simply, smartphones may soon become totally obsolete as the second, third, and even fourth generation of superphones are already on the horizon.

Ryan Fleming
Former Gaming/Movies Editor
Ryan Fleming is the Gaming and Cinema Editor for Digital Trends. He joined the DT staff in 2009 after spending time covering…
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